Spooner, R., Bird, J. M., Clemente, R., Izagirre, N. I., Fernandez Fueyo, E., Watling, D., Plans, D., Brewer, R., Bird, G. and Murphy, J. (2024).
Interoception – how we feel what our body is doing – has been linked to wellbeing. A team, with Geoff Bird, looked at a new app that might how accurate someone is at feeling signals form their body.
It uses the ‘Phase Adjustment Task’. The user hears bleeps that are out of sync with, but at the speed of, their heartbeat. The user’s task is then to match up the beeps with their heartbeats.
The study shows that this way of measuring interoception is just as accurate when used outside of the lab, as it is in the lab. This allows researchers to collect larger and more diverse samples in future research.
Knowing that this tool is accurate may allow us to investigate the links between interoception, alexithymia (how we feel our emotions), and autism.
Available at: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1514c9e0-2e84-4076-a842-cd1ed0854622